Magic on the Sea of Cortez: Let Steinbeck Be Your Guide
East Coast Folks Need To Cruise Baja at Least Once
“The very air here is miraculous, and outlines reality change with the moment. The sky sucks up the land and disgorges it. A dream hangs over the whole region, a brooding kind of hallucination.”—John Steinbeck, “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” 1941
On our second day out from La Paz, heading north over the Sea of Cortez, I recognized yet another familiar shape, two of them actually.
“Do you see the monkey over there?” I asked, glancing to port.
“The white one who looks like he’s sitting down. You see it, too? I was thinking that looked like a monkey!” She was amused that, despite the gender divide, both our brains had “seen” something simian about a pile of boulders rising from the dark blue sea.
“But do you see the big dog?” I asked. “He looks like he’s sneaking up on the monkey.”
“Now I do,” she said. “He’s going to get that monkey.”
As children, all of us played this game with clouds, but over these Mexican waters the clouds were scarce. Instead the rocks and cliff sides teased our imaginations. Prior to our monkey, I had beheld a queen on her throne, the Queen Mary underway, an ancient Buddhist totem and several crumbling Celtic forts and crusader castles.
To me, those fabulous four boulders standing shoulder-to-shoulder conjured “The Beatles.”
The only natural sculpture that I can recall from my native New England was the Old Man of the Mountain. Though, alas, his face fell off Cannon Mountain in 2003, the granite profile continues to adorn the back of the New Hampshire quarter—a two-bit memorial, you might say.
Travel deep enough down Mexico's 760-mile Baja Peninsula, and you are certain to find the Old Man’s brother or cousin—maybe his entire beetle-browed family—keeping vigil in his stead.
A writer that I know says he experiences heightened powers of observation when he goes to sea, the survival instinct of a creature away from his native element. Imagine, then, two people from the woodlands and suburbs of the Northeast on their first cruise in the Sea of Cortez.
Not only are we two land dwellers gliding across a couple thousand feet of blue liquid, but it appears we are doing so on some other planet. With the possible exception of the Red Sea, the Baja resembles nowhere else on earth you can take a boat.
Nothing happens for nothing. Therefore, seeing the shapes in clouds and rocks is more than child’s play; it may well be an attempt to impose order on an apparently random world. The ability to crack the code, to identify patterns, is a survival skill that can benefit any of us, from the trooper in Afghanistan to the broker on Wall Street to the nurse in the local E.R.
Recognition sometimes comes to us as a “gut feeling” or the hairs standing up on the backs of our necks. Seeing shapes may well be equivalent to involuntary mental calisthenics, exercises enabling us to win greater rewards and avoid suffering.
As the expression goes, a change of scenery will do you good. And an extreme change of scenery might do you even better, so welcome to Baja.
Given their over-familiarity with Western topography, I doubt our cruising brethren from California, though they love Baja, can experience the region as intensely as we East Coast people. And in our particular case, we were doing so from the flybridge of a powercat, an inherently futuristic vessel with a commanding view of the lunar-like sea of tranquility that lay before us.
For 40 years I’ve been an enthusiastic Baja fan. Flying into San Diego, I made several road trips part way down the peninsula, which happens to be longer than Italy.
In 2003, I delivered a trawler from Florida to Ensenada (a Mexican port about 60 miles south of San Diego), and, though we stopped at Cabo San Lucas, I deeply regretted not having time for a detour up the Sea of Cortez. Then came an opportunity to charter a boat there.1
Most charter grounds fall into two categories: Old World or tropical. Old World includes any place in the Mediterranean or the barge canals of France; most others look alike, sugar sand beaches and palm trees. For proof that the Sea of Cortez is not like the others, you only have to look at the photos accompanying this article.
But there’s more. Besides its powerful scenery, Baja has three other superlatives:
It is a fabulous eating destination that has developed its own “Baja-Med” cuisine that is a fusion of Mexican, Mediterranean and Asian cooking using fresh local ingredients. (In La Paz, El Ajibe and Las Tres Virgines are notable Baja Med venues.)
Related to No. 1, the fishing is so good that waters of the East Coast and Caribbean seem barren by comparison.
Related to No. 2, the sealife-watching is superb, especially the whales that inhabit these waters from January to March. Jacques Cousteau called the Sea of Cortez “the world’s aquarium” and the “Galapagos of North America.”
Though not unique to Baja, it should be noted that the people are friendly and like Americans. No, they really do.
And being in the city of La Paz feels as comfortable as a well-worn pair of shoes. The water is clean, the streets are clean, and at the end of the working day, the city’s seaside boardwalk (In Spanish, the Malecon) comes alive with families and friends enjoying the gentle breeze and colors of sunset.
The most famous person to have chartered in the Sea of Cortez did so more than 80 years ago. Author John Steinbeck was at his peak, having just published “The Grapes of Wrath,” when he and his best friend, a marine biologist named Ed Ricketts, chartered a 76-foot sardine boat for a research voyage.
In their 4,000-mile trip aboard Western Flyer, Steinbeck, Ricketts and four professional mariners ventured up and down the Sea of Cortez, including a leg from La Paz to Puerto Escondido—just more eventfull than ours would be.
The Western Flyer expedition discovered several new species, but that was not the goal. Steinbeck and Ricketts were early adherents to the notion of holistic ecologies that we take for granted today. They were more interested in seeing how different species in the inter-tidal zone related to one another—urchins, starfish, hermit crabs, etc. They collected thousands of specimens.
Published in 1941, a year after the expedition, “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” contained much more than marine biology, however. The book was a lively blend of travel narrative, philosophical musings and a brooding sense of history in the making.
Nineteen-forty was the “hinge-year” of our 20th century; Hitler’s armies were rampaging across Europe, but the U.S. was still at peace, drifting uneasily toward Dec. 7, 1941.
Four years later, the end of World War II would set in motion the trends that created recreational boating as we know it and produced new cities such as Cabo San Lucas. Today, the influx of gringo Baby Boomers has positioned historic La Paz as Baja’s genteel alternative to the party-hearty environment at “Cabo Wabo.”
“On the water’s edge of La Paz a new hotel was going up,” wrote Steinbeck, “and it looked very expensive. Probably the airplanes will bring weekenders from Los Angeles before long, and the beautiful poor bedraggled old town will bloom with a Floridian ugliness.”
Steinbeck was referring to the Hotel Perla, and he need not have worried. La Paz was not ruined, old Perla is still entertaining guests, and though several new resort hotels, villas and condo complexes dot the adjoining landscape, there is little ugliness of any sort.
Following in Steinbeck’s wake, we too set course for Puerto Escondido. This “Hidden Harbor,” as its name signifies in Spanish, had long held my interest because of its on-again, off-again development as a recreational port. Steinbeck called Escondido “a place of magic.”
On the way we took a couple detours, first nosing the boat up to Los Islotes, rock outcroppings where boatloads of tourists come to swim with sea lions.
Steinbeck and Ricketts, with their ideas about inter-species relations, surely would have had something to say about that. Personally, I would never get in the water with a single sea lion, let alone a platoon of them, though we watched a gaggle of happy campers doing just that. The sea lions, I’m told, hardly ever bite the tourists, and everyone involved in that day’s mammalian love fest seemed to be getting along …well…swimmingly.
Shortly after turning our bow northward again, we saw a big stingray near the surface, then a pod of pilot whales. Looking rubbery black and keeping close together, the pilots were our consolation prize for not having visited during the winter months when Grey whales are everywhere. Next we nosed up to Isla Coyote, the smallest inhabited island in the Sea of Cortez. A clan of fishermen lives in a neat little village there, built atop what looks like a sloping flat rock.
Then we saw dolphins by the hundreds, as we did every day thereafter. This dolphin army cavorted all around us, many launching themselves high out of the water to get a better look at us. By the dozen, they took turns rubbing their backs against the water displaced by our bows. They seemed genuinely happy to see us, unlike their Floridian cousins, who seem to have become indifferent to our presence.
Though landward it may have been 100 degrees, our own apparent wind, added to a few knots of northeasterly breeze, helped us keep cool beneath the canvas top. We glided into Puerto El Gato at 4 p.m. and anchored near the bay’s most distinguishing feature, a rock slope that looked like giant toes molded from red clay, left out in the rain, then baked.
Two worn Cal 25 sailboats were already in the anchorage, and we took note that neither had an outboard in its transom slot. Male and female buddy-boaters, both in their 20s, had bravely cruised down from the States under sail alone, according to some American sailors that knew the pair. I’ll think of those kids next time I am in a Bahamian anchorage, surrounded by a fleet of over-equipped, over-cautious and overweight American cruisers.
Steinbeck’s expedition had dealings with native people, described as Indians, paddling dugout canoes. We met our version at El Gato in the form of Manuel the Fisherman. When we arrived at El Gato, he was putt-putting around the anchorage in his outboard-driven panga. He stood off and watched us anchor.
Even a rural Mexican fisherman knows you need to watch out for those charter customers, and when he saw the hook had set, he signaled to us that we had done a good job. Then he came alongside and introduced himself.
“Are you interested in having some lobsters for dinner?” Manuel asked.
No thank you, I said, exercising my Spanish, but do you have any clams?
“Clams? I would get you some ‘chocolates’ right now,” he said, “but I am 74 and have a difficult time diving.” A “chocolate” is the local version of what New Englanders call a “quahog,” though its shell is not grayish but brown like a Hershey bar.
After Manuel left, the bees arrived. Our briefer at base had warned us they would come. Not every bee in the desert is assigned to flower duty; some are sent to colle1wct water, which they regurgitate to be shared or used for cooling purposes back at the hive.
Apparently a boat underway collects puddles of freshwater too tiny for us to see, but big enough to fill a bee’s gut. Dousing the boat in saltwater, our briefer told us, keeps them from coming, but that had seemed like a lot of work to us. Now they were swarming into the main saloon, and we faced a dilemma.
Earlier, I had decided we would not run the air conditioner that night—and therefore the genset—in deference to our neighbors on the Cal 25s. I knew how annoying it was to be in a hot bunk and unable to sleep because of the throb and splash of a generator from a boat whose occupants had the thermostat set to 62 degrees. Now, we were closing all the hatches and doors because of the bees, which made the interior unbearably hot. We decided to move to the far end of the anchorage and run the A/C.
I’m sure our neighbors in the Cal 25’s took this the wrong way, as the act of a couple of snotty charter people re-anchoring just to get away from them, but that really was not the case. Eventually the bees retreated, and we cooked a couple steaks on the grill and settled in for the night.
The next morning, we left El Gato shortly before 9 a.m. to finish the trip to Puerto Escondido. Manuel the Fisherman had taken us for late-risers apparently and had to gun his Mercury outboard to catch up. He waved us to a halt, hollering “chocolates, chocolates!”
Manuel came alongside and held up the mesh bag full of clams. I asked him how much for 20. As most of the negotiating world learned long ago, you never answer this question from a gringo directly. “Give me what you think they are worth,” he said. Twenty years ago, I had bought 20 steamed clams for $4 in San Felipe, but that was 20 years ago.
I proposed paying 20 U.S. dollars for the clams. He raised his right hand, and seeing five fingers, I thought he was upping the ante. Okay, I started to say, I’ll pay $25.
“No, no, amigo. High fi, high fi!” Manuel said. Ahhh…I get it, high five! With the slap of our hands we had a deal: a buck a clam. For another $15 we bought a beautiful little souvenir pillow that Manuel’s wife had decorated with intricate needlepoint flowers. “She spent an entire week doing that one,” he said.
A few hours later we dropped anchor at Isla Danzante, at a lovely little anchorage called Honeymoon Cove. When we arrived we saw two small stingrays leap high out of the water, but they were not merely jumping. While airborne, they actually flapped their “wings,” and even seemed to be gaining some air traction (“I think I can. I think I can.”), when gravity pulled them back into the turquoise waters.
We had stopped for a swim and a leisurely lunch of steamed clams, since the cove was just 3½ nautical miles from Puerto Escondido, our destination on the “mainland.” I served the clams just as they had in San Felipe, on a tray with a cup of melted butter at center, slices of lime lining the outside edges, fresh cilantro leaves sprinkled over the open shells, and with bottles of hot sauce and two frosty Pacifico beers on the table.
The clams were good but chewier than my recollection of the San Felipe variety, which more resembled our own quahogs. Cherrystones or littlenecks (depending on the quahog’s age) are a sweet little amorphous mass of pale pinkish yellow flesh. Inside its shell, a “chocolate” seems to have a number of parts and pieces either absent or unnoticeable on a steamed quahog. This includes an appendage that looks like part of a squid and, most noticeably, something resembling Gene Simmon’s tongue only redder.
At Puerto Escondido we took one of 115 moorings installed in a large perfectly sheltered harbor with an excellent marina, once operated by the Mexican government but now in private hands. Nearby is the old colonial town of Loreto, and it was well worth the visit.
Leaving Puerto Escondido the next day, we were now officially on the return trip to La Paz. We went around the north and down the east side of Isla Danzante because our chart, annotated for anglers, said the dropoff there would be good for Dorado in summer. I had packed a hand-line and a couple lures in our luggage.
The “Cuban reel,” as it’s called in Florida, was a circular assembly made of plastic with finger grips on the inside of a rim wound with line. Letting out a couple hundred feet, I hung the reel over the faucet at the flybridge sink. In one position, the spigot locked the reel in place. By rotating the spigot 90 degrees, the reel would release to pay out more line, even making a clunking drag-like sound as the finger-grips rapped against metal.
Despite the chart and sophistication of our gear, we had only one strike and no hook-up. We arrived at our next anchorage, Agua Verde, with grilled chicken on the menu. Agua Verde was another beautiful bay set against a backdrop of mountains, with a tiny fishing village along its shore.
With the sun falling low in the sky and the air cooling, we watched in fascination as a herd of 50 or 60 goats moved from one rocky hill to another. Every time we thought the lead goats had miscalculated and could proceed no further because of a drop off or barrier, they managed to find a precarious way forward, and the herd followed.
Stars that night shone more intensely than possible in the polluted (and light polluted) skies over the East Coast this time of year. Communications satellites orbiting overhead were clear to see, and even though the Perseid meteor showers had peaked a few days earlier, shooting stars were numerous still.
Shortly after departing Agua Verde the next morning, we once again unrolled our line and lure. Soon we could see the flashes of silver jumping from the water around our faux squid. The clattering of plastic against chrome signaled “fish on” as the line ran out. Throwing the engines into neutral, I retrieved reel from faucet. To my relief the strength of the tugs suggested that we had hooked a fairly small specimen.
Passing the line down onto the aft cockpit, I went down and slowly “reeled” the fish in. Lifting our tuna onto the aft-most “sugar scoop” of the port hull, I could see it was a perfect fish for two people, under two feet long. I gripped the tail with a bath towel and poured Tequila down its gills. Alcohol is a non-violent way to dispatch a fish, which, having imbibed, promptly takes a one-way trip to pelagic Margaritaville.
Next morning we dinghied to the beach and hiked the ridge of hills surrounding the bay, where four other boats lay at anchor widely spaced along its shore. After a last swim, we set off on a leisurely cruise back La Paz for one last night in the City of Peace.
En route, we nosed into the various lovely anchorages on Espiritu Santo, an island about the size of Manhattan just a few miles outside La Paz. If you ventured no further than Espiritu Santo on a charter, it would be a week well spent nonetheless.
Someday, I would love to trace Steinbeck’s entire route around the gulf. And while mindful that our five-day trip was a small thing compared to his 1940 voyage, let me end by quoting from the final chapter of his book:
This trip had dimension and tone. It was a thing whose boundaries seeped through itself and beyond into some time and space that was more than all the Gulf and more than all our lives. Our fingers turned over the stones and we saw life that was like our life.
Three companies that offer charters from La Paz: The Moorings, Dream Yacht and La Paz Yacht Charter.
Oh, I wish!
Such a fabulous write up. Next best thing to being there.
My boat is in the Atlantic now for the duration, at my age.
I could read such stories all day long, Peter.
They're not sea-lions, but around Montague Island off the South Coast of New South Wales is a colony of juvenile fur-seals, which are baby-sat by the bachelor-seals while breeding males and all the females above a certain age go off to cavort. There's limited anchorage there, usually occupied by powered dive-boats, and an historic lighthouse. The island itself is a nature-reserve. (https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/visit-a-park/parks/barunguba-montague-island-nature-reserve)
The juvenile seals are presumably protected from shark-attacks and taught to hunt. They will often all swim together with one flipper in the air to stay cool, which can look like them all waving.
https://ausemade.com.au/wp-content/uploads/seals-off-montague-island-20031105-convar4758-1024x768.jpg
But jump in the water with them and they go crazy playing with you -- lunging at you and barking under water, staring into your mask, tugging at your dive-hood, nibbling at your fins, and spinning around you in spirals. You can easily suck a scuba-tank dry in 20 minutes trying to keep up.
I doubt that I'd swim with any adult otary because if they took objection to your company, there's not much you could do. But it's great fun playing respectfully with their juveniles (or rather, letting them play with you.)